ASRock's and ASUS's Latest Take on the X399 Platform - Conclusion

ASRock X399M Taichi Motherboard – A First of its Kind M-ATX X399 Motherboard With a Feature Heavy Design

The ASRock X399M Taichi is an impressive motherboard to say the least. Much smaller than the full X399 Taichi due to its m-ATX form factor but also packing just about the same feature set as its ATX brother. The X399M Taichi has everything you’d expect from a high-end motherboards, supports all Ryzen Threadripper chips, overclocks like a breeze and in my opinion, packs a slightly better power delivery system which keeps the power consumption not as aggressive as the X399 Taichi and VRM temperature stays cool enough.

The board packs a 11 Phase power delivery system which sustained good overclocks on our Ryzen Threadripper 1920X and 1900X processors. It’s just the OC wall on the Ryzen chips that doesn’t let us go past a certain limit while the boards themselves are a very capable bunch.

In terms of features, the board has dual LAN ports, dual USB 3.1 ports, support for dual multi-gpus in either crossfire or SLI configuration and onboard wireless capabilities. In terms of ram support, the board does come with four less DDR4 DIMM slots which support up to 64 GB capacity and not the intended 128 GB but take that as good thing. When the CPU is feeding lesser memory lanes, it will be suitable to gain even better stability and higher overclocks. This also allows one to get ever faster memory clocks which is a plus point for the motherboard.

Overall, the ASRock X399M Taichi is a smaller but killer X399 package. It’s one of the most interesting X399 motherboards as no one else is doing m-ATX X399 and ASRock should be given credit for supporting AMD’s HEDT platform in this market. At $339 US, the X399M Taichi is also one of the cheapest X399 offering for AMD’s HEDT platform which lacks nothing over the Taichi except for a few PCIe slots which were gonna go anyways considering the size of this motherboard but for Small Form Factor builders waiting for a smaller sized X399 HEDT board, now you have it.

The other board I had for testing today was the ASUS ROG STRIX X399-E Gaming and oh boy, was I glad to get this motherboard. To be honest, I have started to like the ROG STRIX design language over their PRIME, TUF and ROG (Only) products. There’s something in there that appeals all kinds of users, whether they be gamers or overclockers.

The ASUS ROG STRIX X399-E Gaming is a full fledged E-ATX monster which takes note of several things from its bigger ROG brother, the ROG Zenith Extreme and tones down to a slightly affordable yet still premium price range. We are talking $400 US for this motherboard but this is nowhere in the premium range of X399 motherboards. They cost near the $500 US range so while the price isn’t satisfactory, the features and brilliant overclocking make up for it.

Talking about features, the ASUS ROG STRIX has a load of them but I’d give extra credits to the X399M Taichi which incorporated dual LAN ports and even tripe M.2 slots on a smaller surface. ASUS’s ROG STRIX X399-E Gaming has a whole lot of other features and while it doesn’t has any relation to performance gains or losses, an extra LAN port would have been great for gamers.

Moving on, the design and overclocking capabilities of this board are heaven for Ryzen Threadripper PC builders. Not only would the motherboard look good within your PC, it will also allow you to fine tune your Threadripper chip to the limits. The extra cooling, the extravagant RGB and lots of PCIe expansion space makes the ASUS ROG STRIX X399-E Gaming a very powerful offering for PC gamers out there without a doubt.